Saturday, March 02, 2013

Proportion

I used to talk about pangrammatical "homologies", but I now think (and I think someone did point this out to me once a long time ago too) that they should be called "analogies", specifically "identities of relations". Here's one:

Understanding is to science
as
obedience is to politics.

Here's another:

Knowledge is to power
as
understanding is to obedience.

This way of thinking about abstract notions owes something to Pound's "ideogrammic method" and Wittgenstein's "method of perspicuous presentation", both of which approach the alleged "essences" of things in terms of the "family resemblances" that can be established between them.

The Greek analogia, Wikipedia tells me, was at one time translated into Latin as proportio. That sense is useful to me here. I believe in keeping things "in proportion". I believe that our culture has become unhinged because it has lost its sense of proportion about stuff like: